THOMPSON, Manitoba—It all began with a relaxing day of golf, Warren Bertrand explains.
“I saw the storm coming; didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I found shelter under a tree… and I’ll be damned if that blasted storm didn’t strike my nine iron.”
The next thing he knew, he was waking up in the hospital.
Discharged a week later, all seemed to have returned to normal until police were summoned to his home late one evening. Mrs. Bertrand was carried away on a stretcher, electrocuted, but alive.
“It was about ten at night,” he recounted. “I was just starting to feel normal again and we’d decided to become…intimate and that’s when it happened. I felt her go limp underneath me and I knew something was wrong.”
Police brought him in for questioning but later released him on his own recognizance. Medical experts are still trying to determine what happened.
“There’s a lot we don’t fully understand about body chemistry; doubly so when there is more than one person connected,” explained Howard Trent, an Assistant Professor in Electrochemistry at University of Manitoba. “It’s entirely likely that Mr. Bertrand was carrying a residual electrical charge. Some combination of motion, friction, pH level, and well, sexual chemistry, led to a spontaneous discharge from his… uhm, rod.”
Sheila Bertrand declined to press charges.
“Things between Warren and me are good. Really good,” she told Mooseclean’s. “The lab investigators told us they don’t think it will happen a second time.”
She paused to twirl her hair.
“Too bad, really.”